A short life of the author
William Howard Gass (30 July 1924 – 6 December 2017) was an American novelist, essayist, literary critic, and philosopher who was the most formidably intellectual fiction writer of the postwar era — a man who insisted that the primary obligation of fiction is not to tell stories or represent reality but to create beautiful sentences, and who devoted a sixty-year career to demonstrating what that conviction looks like in practice. He was a philosophical novelist in the fullest sense: trained in analytic philosophy at Cornell under Max Black, he held a PhD in philosophy and taught it at Washington University in St. Louis for three decades while writing fiction and criticism of extraordinary density, precision, and verbal beauty.
Early Life and Philosophy
Gass grew up in Fayette, Ohio, in a household he later described as loveless and oppressive — his father was a racist, his mother an alcoholic. He attended Ohio Wesleyan University, served in the Navy during World War II, and earned his PhD in philosophy at Cornell. His philosophical training profoundly shaped his approach to fiction: he was interested in Wittgenstein, in the philosophy of language, in the question of what words do and are rather than what they refer to. His fiction and his philosophy are not separate enterprises — they are the same enterprise conducted in different registers.
Omensetter’s Luck (1966)
Gass’s first novel, set in a small Ohio town in the 1890s, tells the story of Brackett Omensetter, a man of seemingly effortless natural grace, and Jethro Furber, a tormented Calvinist preacher who is consumed with envy and self-loathing. The novel was immediately recognised as a work of extraordinary linguistic power — the prose is dense, musical, and rhythmically inventive in ways that recall Faulkner but are entirely Gass’s own. Stanley Elkin called it “the most important work of fiction by an American in this literary generation.”
The novel is not easy. Gass makes no concessions to readers who want plot to move briskly or characters to behave in conventionally sympathetic ways. The reward is a prose experience unlike anything else in American fiction — sentences that are simultaneously philosophical arguments and sensory events.
In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (1968)
This collection of stories contains some of Gass’s finest short fiction, particularly the title story — a series of numbered sections describing a small Indiana town that functions as both a realistic portrait and an investigation of how consciousness transforms place into language. “The Pedersen Kid” is a harrowing winter story about a boy found nearly frozen in a snowdrift. The collection established Gass as a master of the short form.
Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife (1968)
An experimental novella published as a special issue of TriQuarterly, with photographs, typographical experiments, coloured pages, and footnotes that consume the text. The “lonesome wife” of the title is language itself — Gass’s metaphor for the neglect and misuse that beautiful prose suffers at the hands of readers who care only about content. It is Gass’s most extreme formal experiment and a manifesto for his aesthetic.
The Tunnel (1995)
Gass’s magnum opus, which took twenty-six years to write, is the story of William Frederick Kohler, a Midwestern historian who has just completed a book about the rise of Nazism in Germany and who, instead of writing the introduction, begins digging a tunnel from his basement. What emerges is a sprawling, scatological, linguistically virtuosic confession that explores guilt, self-deception, prejudice, the banality of evil, and the relationship between the historian’s intellectual condemnation of fascism and his own petty domestic fascisms. Kohler is one of the most repellent and most brilliantly rendered narrators in American fiction.
The Tunnel divided critics sharply. Admirers called it one of the great American novels; detractors found it bloated, self-indulgent, and morally repugnant. Both responses are partly correct, which is the point.
The Essays
Gass was one of the finest essayists in the English language. His critical collections — Fiction and the Figures of Life (1970), The World Within the Word (1978), Habitations of the Word (1985), Finding a Form (1996), A Temple of Texts (2006) — contain essays on Gertrude Stein, Rilke, Colette, Proust, Faulkner, Malcolm Lowry, and the nature of fiction that are themselves works of literary art. On Being Blue (1976) — a meditation on the colour blue, on sadness, on obscenity, and on the blueness of language itself — is one of the most original prose works of the twentieth century.
Middle C (2013)
Gass’s final novel, published when he was eighty-eight, is the story of Joseph Skizzen, a music professor at a small Ohio college who has constructed his entire identity on a lie. It won the William Dean Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and demonstrated that Gass’s powers remained formidable into his ninth decade.
Critical Standing
Gass is a writer’s writer — admired by John Barth, Stanley Elkin, Robert Coover, and virtually every serious practitioner of experimental fiction, but largely unknown to the general reading public. His insistence that the sentence is the fundamental unit of literary art, and that a novel should be judged by the quality of its sentences rather than the interest of its plot, places him in the tradition of Flaubert, Stein, and Nabokov. He is the most uncompromising aestheticist in American literature.
Collecting Gass
Omensetter’s Luck (1966, New American Library) in first edition with dust jacket is highly sought, bringing $200–$500. The Tunnel (1995, Knopf) first edition is collectible. On Being Blue (1976, David R. Godine) in the small first printing is desirable. Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife in the original TriQuarterly format is a bibliographic curiosity. Gass’s papers are held at Washington University in St. Louis.